Modotte Kuru
by kaliawai512
Summary: Mai had left, and for a long time, she wasn't sure if she was coming back. But of all the days she wanted to spend with some of the dearest people from her past, this had to be it. Even if there's someone else who still wants her here with him.


**Oh, how good it feels to come back to my oneshots... For those of you who read my work frequently, I will be back to regular oneshots in December! I am past the two-thirds point in writing my supremely-long fanfic that I hope to post sometime next year, after it's been torn apart and put back together in editing.**

**Happy birthday, Mai! For the record, when this story takes place (shortly post-canon), Mai would be turning about twenty-five. Did you know Mai is only a month younger than Pegasus (unless I got my birthday and age info wrong)?  
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**This is intended to be a development of friendly relationships, but I can understand if it's read as either (or both) vaguely Mai/Valon and/or Mai/Jounouchi, though a good bit of it is probably one-sided. You can feel free to read it how you like, but as always, I write non-romance works, so please don't run away for pairing reasons. My writing stays pretty neutral. But reading back this particular story, I realize it turned out much more suggestive of mild romantic themes than I had intended, so take it as you will. The story is rated for very slightly dark themes (it's Orichalcos-related, what did you expect?) and Mai's very, very minor rude-ish language. **

**Though the exact currency exchange rate has changed, you can take one hundred yen to be approximately one dollar. Ramen, as some of you know, is one of the most common snacks in Japan (like pizza is to Americans), and you can do just about anything with it for a meal.**

**I used the Japanese names for all the characters, bikers included. Although the name "Amelda" makes me giggle, and I'm much more used to "Allister," for accuracy's sake, I use Amelda. Feel free to pretend it's "Allister" if you prefer that version.  
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**I hope you all enjoy, and please leave a review! Reviews help push me forward... so I can finish up this darned long story and start getting it ready to post.**

**PS: The site has been particularly annoying with deleting spaces recently, so please report any bugs you find so I can fix the document. Thanks!  
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_Modotte Kuru_

_Given that winter was just around the corner, she probably should have expected it would be cold._

_ But she didn't, and she shivered again as the chilled air blew against her at over a hundred kilometers an hour and stung the bare flesh of her upper arms and the skin around her neck. She normally didn't mind the cold, but she really wished she had at least been smart enough to put on a jacket before making the trip._

_ Particularly if she had had enough mind to think before she left that she would be on the road for nearly half the day on a motorcycle instead of in her heated car._

_ Maybe she really should have given more thought before selling it after all._

_ But there was no sense in worrying over it now, she decided. What was done was done, and Kujaku Mai was not one to spend time whining over things that could not be changed. She was already on her way, and she hadn't brought a jacket—even if she had on gloves that covered most of her arms and boots that came up above her knees to just below her skirt—and she hadn't known that she would be on a motorcycle for nearly half the day in search of her destination._

_ And on top of all of that, she wasn't even sure she was going the right way._

_ Oh, yes. This was turning out to be a very trying day indeed._

_ She leaned her head just enough to the side to brush the part of her cheek that wasn't covered by her helmet against her shoulder. The wind picked up a bit, or maybe it was just her speed. She pressed down on the gas just a little more, even though she had always been warned even by the most dangerous of riders how to keep her speed modest and put a lot less reality into the risk of flipping off and cracking open her skull._

_ She pressed forward anyway. She filled her mind with thoughts of warm buildings and a good hot cup of coffee. Black, or too much sugar, she didn't really care. Just coffee. Coffee hot enough to burn her tongue and the back of her throat and sizzle as it fell down to her stomach._

_ And a smiling face trying to hold back snickers when she choked on too large a sip._

_ And her only problem was finding out whether this little empty highway in the middle of nowhere was taking her closer or further and further away._

_ She laughed very gently and made a note to remind herself to call that idiot if she ended up lost at a cheap motel and blow his ears out for giving such awful directions._

* * *

><p>There was a strange sort of familiarity to the idea that she had no idea where she was going.<p>

It wasn't like before, of course. It wasn't like when she had spent most of her time working as a dealer at casinos or on cruise liners. Then she had just been tasting freedom, rushing out on her own with no sense of what she wanted in the world other than a means to continue what she was already doing. Cards. Money. That was all she wanted. That was all she needed. That was all she was headed towards.

It wasn't like that now.

Now, she had tasted a sense of having a place where she belonged.

Now she was out on her own again, and once again, she had no idea where she was going. She had no sense of where she would end up or if she would see anyone she knew in a very long time. The future was a big black hole she was being shoved into, and she knew fighting would do no good, so she didn't fight, and just let herself go, with no idea what was at the other end of the tunnel.

She was Kujaku Mai. And she was going to enjoy that tunnel if it killed her.

Where she had been, though, now _that _she knew. Places blurred together, as they did when she had traveled to them, so that all she had as proof that she had been somewhere new were the tickets she always kept from her airplane trips or cruise ships she hopped a ride on, always getting a discount if she offered to help out in the local casino or wait tables for a few evenings. No one ever said no if she offered. She didn't care why. All she cared was getting her ride, and getting it cheap.

The planes took her places, but the ships took her everywhere. She caught ships going to America, ships to England and France, ships to Africa even if she never got off. She even caught one ship going to China and finally climbed that Great Wall everyone was always blabbering about, and it wouldn't have struck her as all that interesting if she hadn't run into a few duelists there and gotten a good tag-team match out of it all.

She had stayed after the duel, though, and watched the sun lower itself onto the horizon, and she imagined Jounouchi laughing in the back of her head and telling her that the sun looked like a ball of cheese.

And Mai had laughed as loud as she could, not caring if the whole of China heard her, and she almost did not feel the tears behind her eyes before they faded and were gone.

The next ship she caught had brought her here. Okinawa. Back to Japan, but away from Japan all at once. It was an island, a calm little place away from everything. Things here were quiet. It wasn't really her type of place. But it was a place. It was somewhere to go, somewhere to be. And until she could catch another ship out of here, she decided she might as well stay.

And staying had been what found her sitting alone on the beach in the middle of the afternoon, the bento a nice local lady had packed for her lying at her side, perfectly still, until the world decided to announce to her that she was no longer alone, and announce it proudly with one word in a voice hesitant and almost unsure.

"Mai?"

Mai jolted, and her bare feet brushed though the sand as she dug them in and turned, as dignified as her scrambled mind would allow.

But any of that dignity vanished in an instant, when her eyes saw and then really _saw _the form standing not two meters away, in a plain red T-shirt and jeans that almost didn't suit him, and hair that looked like he had soaked it in gel before spiking it up, and a motorcycle helmet clutched like an infant under his arm.

The tension within her rose and fell.

"Valon?"

She might have gasped it or spoken it loud and clear and it wouldn't have sounded any different.

It might have been easy to think that she had fallen asleep on the beach, or maybe that kooky waiter had spiked the drink she bought this morning and she was just hallucinating. But above anything else, Mai used logic, and logic told her that this was no dream and no one had spiked her drink—no matter how crazy that waiter had been.

This was real. And the young man standing in front of her with the spiked-up hair and clothes that looked far too normal to be his was real, too.

As was the way his eyes nearly popped out of his head as he stared at her right back.

"Mai, I … you're … here."

The words came as stutters, like babble was running through his head and he couldn't make any sense of it except for those few words.

Mai swallowed the last bit of her that told her this couldn't be true. "Yeah … I am."

Valon huffed out, then breathed back in, and took one more step forward. He moved like he was real. His feet sunk a little in the sand, and his eyebrows, which had risen nearly to the top of his forehead, lowered in that sort of questioning confusion she should have known so well.

"What are you doing here?"

Mai's raised eyebrows turned to a scowl. She tossed her head up so her hair flipped behind her shoulders and her brow furrowed and her lips pursed.

"What's that supposed to mean? I'm here because I'm here."

Valon flinched like she had slapped him across the face, and he reached up to rub his cheek with the back of his hand as if rubbing a fading mark of red.

"Right. But … we're both here," he half-muttered, glancing away as he spoke, staring at some of the sand that disappeared into the water as the waves rolled in and out. He turned back to Mai and crossed his arms over his chest in that old winking gesture he always wore when he popped up in her mind. Only he wasn't winking, and this time, he quirked his head. "You know I was here?"

Mai would have snorted, but she had more dignity than that. She scoffed.

"Don't flatter yourself. The island's gorgeous. You just get in the way."

But her lips turned up into a smile she didn't want to be there but let be there anyway, and when she turned just enough so she could see him out of the corner of her eye, she saw Valon throw his head back and laugh. She wondered if she had ever seen him laugh out of something funny and not out of vengeance or pride. She wondered if he always laughed like that, and if his hair always flopped about like a wild animal's fur when he did.

Her smile turned to a smirk, despite herself. She rested a hand on her knee and leaned in toward where he still stood. "Besides, I'm a lot closer to home than you are."

Valon adjusted his arms against his chest and shrugged. He took the last few steps through the sand and flopped himself down like she supposed a gang member trying to look cool might flop down on the couch. But his feet brushed sand into his eyes when they kicked in, and he ended up blinking and swatting at his face with the back of his hand. Mai laughed. Valon smiled a smile that might have been shy, and might have just been a grin. He shrugged again.

"I don't really have a home, so this is as good as any."

"Hm."

His smile faded after a moment, though the odd gentleness in his eyes did not. He looked at her like he hadn't seen her in years instead of a few months—as if he had known her his whole life instead of only since early last spring. A part of her wanted to smile at him. A part of her just wanted to roll her eyes and give him a good swat across the face.

He rubbed his hands together. "So … what'cha been up to?"

She fixed her gaze on him. Her eyes narrowed on instinct.

"Is that any of your business?"

Valon flinched, shifting nervously in his place.

But Mai smiled a second later and turned her head out to stare into the distance, where the blue of the horizon met the blue of the sea. She shrugged. "Spending time away from everything … thinking about where I should go next."

She heard a half-laugh, but did not turn to see it.

"Aren't we all."

Catching up with him was not some big dramatic event, as she might have expected. She might have expected engaging, prying questions about her own life, and talk of darker times not so very long ago, and whether the past was as far away and yet close by as it felt. She got simple, quick questions, the basic stuff she hadn't known Valon even knew how to ask. Small talk. Just as if they were two regular people talking about nothing at all.

But it wasn't nothing at all, either. There were mentions of far-away places traveled to on a motorcycle, all vague, like she was seeing the images he gave her through a thick and unforgiving fog. She could almost look at him and see those places in his eyes, places she had been and places she had never been, and places they might have met before if fate that timed their meetings just a little different.

Then she told him about hopping ships.

Traveling to China, traveling to little places in Europe and Africa, traveling wherever she was taken on the cheap rides she earned. She didn't like working as a casino dealer, though she didn't know why she bothered to tell him—she wondered if she had ever told him when she knew him before about her old life, when Yuugi and his friends weren't even a distant glance. But whether or not he knew, Valon listened, like it was the most interesting story in the world. Her words trailed off into silence, and a smile quirked onto his face.

And he reached into his jacket and held out the Cyber Harpie card she had left at his bedside all those months before.

Words were not needed for that. And even if they were, Mai could not have found them. She took the offered card with hands caring and gentle, and slipped it—as flawless and well-cared for as she had left it, even after so much time—into the deck case strapped to her thigh.

It seemed hours later that Valon cleared his throat, and the vagueness of quiet shattered like glass.

"Hey, Mai, uh …"

She turned and looked at him in full again with blinking eyes.

"Hm?"

Valon rubbed his arm and angled his head away. "Well, uh …" he stuttered, words tripping over his own teeth.

She lowered her brow. "Spit it out, hair boy."

He wrung his hands and turned his gaze to her out of the corner of his eye. "… if you don't have anywhere else you're staying …"

Mai spun her head in the fury and horror she might have shown to Jounouchi if he suggested she use her Harpie Ladies as drink coasters.

"Are you suggesting we live together!"

Valon scrambled back so fast on the sand he nearly sent himself flying. Both hands went up as if she had threatened to strike him, big eyes gasping all on their own. If she hadn't been focused on glaring she might have laughed again. Valon waved his hands back and forth.

"Not with me!" He lowered one hand and slipped the other behind his head. "With … us."

Mai's glare receded. Her brow quirked. "Us?"

Valon tried all he could to smile, but it still came out more as the hopeful, sheepish grin a child might make when trying to persuade a parent to let them buy the most expensive candy at the store. He nodded.

"Raphael and Amelda. And me."

He tacked the last part on like a sticky note, quiet and muttering, but she still heard it loud and clear, even when he ducked his head. The tension in her shoulders lessened and she looked at him with a quiet contemplation she didn't expect of herself. She wondered if that Anzu-chan might have laughed at her.

She rested an elbow on her knee. "So you guys met up again?"

The last of the nervousness seeping into his posture faded, and he relaxed his legs on the sand with his arms resting in his lap. He shrugged.

"We've got some common history." A tiny, almost ironic smile worked its way onto his face. "It helps that someone understands after … well."

Silence. Mai breathed out and gave a small nod.

"Yeah."

She rubbed her bare knee with her hand, and her fingers brushed along the case for her deck when she lifted her hand and laid it down again. She looked at the horizon, and she flicked her gaze to look at him, so familiar and yet so new. She looked away, and she sighed long and hard.

"I get first dibs on the shower."

Valon jolted like she had poked him in his back with a hot rod. His eyes, which had taken to gazing out into the ocean which rushed up against the shore in the mid-afternoon sun, flicked over toward her. He furrowed his brow. "Huh?"

Mai turned her head up very matter-of-fact.

"Every day," she added, firm. "I get the shower, ladies first. I expect my _own _room and a place to keep my stuff. And I'm driving a _real_ car now, I expect to have a place to put it."

He blinked at her. Once, twice. Every time a heavy blink, every time his eyes reflecting a baffling confusion that almost made her want to laugh. And then, all in an instant, the confusion faded to clarity much like clouds drifting away from the sun. He settled into his place in the sand and smiled a quiet smile that warmed her somewhere deep inside.

"Bet I can get you back on a bike in a week."

She leaned on the arm that rested on her knee. "How much?"

"Fifteen hundred yen?"

Her lips twitched up, more a smile than a smirk. "Twenty five you can't."

Valon's mouth curled to match hers.

"You're on."

She grinned at him, the kind of grin she wasn't sure she had ever given him before. The kind of grin she hadn't given to anyone since those days around Battle City, when that group of boys—and the two little girls—had run up to her with waving arms and smiling faces. Greeting her. Like she actually belonged.

Then her brow lowered into a scowl, and she raised a finger in threat.

"And if any of you guys even _think_ of trying to sneak in my room—"

Valon threw his hands up into the air like he had not five minutes before, waving them back and forth in his own childish defense.

"Come on, Mai, I'm not like that! Amelda won't, and Raphael's got better manners than an English duke."

Her finger lowered, almost as quickly as it had risen. Her scowl turned again to that gentle grin she wished she could better understand. She rested her arm on her knee.

"You better hope I don't regret this, you big idiot."

Valon smiled back, the same smile he had given her when he was just a guy on the street who cared about the girl left all alone, before the Orichalcos or Dartz. When they were just two lost souls, finding one another in the dark, and daring to think that this time, things might turn out okay.

"Don't worry. You won't."

* * *

><p><em>It was some unthinkable relief when she pulled over to rest her legs and saw the faint sparkle of a city out on the horizon.<em>

_ It was far off. Maybe hours off, at this point, and it might have just been a mirage from spending so much time on her bike going a good deal over the speed limit. And she was out in country where there was so little to see that maybe her mind was just filling in blank spaces to cover up her hatred for open land with nothing of interest anywhere in sight._

_ But she saw something. She had trained her mind far too well over the years to only see things that were really there._

_ After the events of Battle City and after she had left Dartz, such a skill was priceless._

_ She squeezed her eyes shut, pursed her lips, and swung her leg back over her bike._

_ Yes. This was real. Not like the horrors of the duels and the state of being her mind had been forced into all those months ago. That had been illusions. It didn't matter what would have happened if things had turned out different in the end, if Yuugi hadn't won. He had. They had all won. And in the end, it had all been just a bad dream._

_ This was not a dream._

_ She smiled a bittersweet sort of smile, kicked the stand from her bike, and wondered if the knowledge that she was going the right way had ever felt so good._

* * *

><p>She had sold her car and picked out a new bike after six days.<p>

Valon probably would have laughed, if she hadn't threatened to buy ants at the pet shop and infest his room while he was asleep.

She suspected he had forgotten she owed him twenty five hundred yen.

They had given her first dibs on the shower, as promised—Raphael had offered to do so even before Valon mentioned their deal, and Amelda had burst out into snickers at the look Valon gave when Raphael also offered to use their savings to buy her new furnishings for her room within an hour after she arrived. But Mai just took the contents of the duffel bag she carried along with her to fill in the nice space they provided, and a little of her own money to replace the shabby futon already laid out with a used bed with real cotton sheets.

Mai had never bothered to ask if Valon had ever suggested the concept of her moving in with them, for how quickly they took to it. But given that Amelda had gone on snickering a long time after Raphael's offer had been declined, Mai felt it fairly safe to deduce that they just liked messing with Valon's head.

She never talked with either of those two about how she had been when she knew them, or how she was now. She couldn't quite make herself bring it up.

But from Raphael's frequent smiles to replace his old serious look and Amelda's laughter that no longer sounded like he wanted to tear off someone's arm, she suspected they were different people just like her.

Valon had been right enough that after all they had been through together, any other differences mattered much less than they normally would.

It was an old warehouse in which they lived. An old, abandoned warehouse near the Japanese coast they had discovered some months after the final incidents of Doma, which had apparently once made textiles or ramen or millions upon millions of marshmallows—depending on what day of the week she asked Amelda to tell the story. Whatever it had once made, now it was empty, and if it had once smelled like ramen or marshmallows, now it just smelled like three guys, the lingering scent of something burning from the kitchen, and motor oil.

Not two weeks after she moved in, the smell of three guys had been replaced by her collection of French perfumes, and the kitchen smelled of sauces or noodles or fish once she taught them how not to overheat the stove.

But no matter what she tried, the place still smelled like motor oil.

It paid off quickly, though. Every few days she and the "boys"—as she called them, though they all insisted they were far past the age of being called "boys"—took rides together out along the shoreline, laughing and trying to talk over the roaring of their motors. Raphael and Amelda told her stories of their travels before they had met up with Valon—Raphael only in bits, accompanied by gentle smiles, and Amelda in enthusiastic tales of adventure and glory, like he was speaking to a child.

Once Valon promised her that someday they would all go to Paris and Italy together, and they would see the world as none of them had ever been able to see it when they weren't alone.

She never really believed him, but it never meant any less.

And besides, after her own travels and adventures, a quiet life with familiar friends somehow seemed perfect in its own strange way.

So as she walked into the kitchen one evening some weeks after she arrived, it felt better than seeing the Leaning Tower of Pisa or the Arc de Triomphe, and almost as good as standing on the sidelines as she watched those once near and dear win tournaments and smile down at her from above.

Standing at the stove had already taken to being a routine activity. So natural, adjusting the heat on the burner and rummaging through the drawers and cabinets for the supplies she needed. It already felt as if this was home, one like she had never had in years, or perhaps ever before, and working there peacefully was the most normal thing in the world.

"So, uh …"

Mai quite nearly pushed over the pot as she adjusted it on the stove.

Peacefully, yes, until the voice cut into the silence of the room like a knife cuts into a carrot.

She spun on her heels to face the startled figure in the doorway with eyes she imagined burning like the warehouse had just caught flames. "Valon!" she half-shouted and half-hissed. Her pounding heart deep in her chest caught and settled, and her nails digging into the palms of her fists at her sides let go. She huffed. "Don't scare me like that!"

Valon chuckled with anxiety soaking into his voice and backed up a step.

"Heh … sorry."

Mai sighed again and shook her head, back and forth, much like a mother would to a son that simply would not stop leaving out his dirty underwear. She turned her eyes to the pot she had nearly pushed over, then flicked them back to him."Well, spit it out."

He blinked. "Hm?"

She rolled her eyes and put a hand on her hip.

"You have something to say," she announced without a hint of question in her voice, then leaned in just enough to make a point. "Spit it out before I make you take my turn cooking dinner tonight."

"You're cooking tonight? I thought it was Amelda's turn."

"Just spit it out already!"

"Okay, okay!" Valon shot back in anxious defense. He shifted back and forth on his feet and rubbed his arm with a hand that had grown calloused as he stopped wearing gloves on his bike. "I was just wondering … if you've seen any of the others. I mean, before I ran into you … before."

His words tripped over themselves like children being shoved all at once into a tiny room. Mai blinked and adjusted the bottom of her purple top.

"Others?"

Valon looked at her, then away, then back to her again. "That Yuugi kid. And, uh, Hon … Honda, right, and that Anzu girl. And … Jounouchi."

The name sounded odd on his tongue, as if he had said it over and over again and was only just now trying to assign meaning to it. Mai wanted to flinch, but did all she could so he wouldn't notice. Valon held her gaze as firmly as he ever had.

"You see any of 'em?"

Mai adjusted her top again, then brushed her nails along her skirt. Her bare feet suddenly felt much colder on the kitchen floor, and she wondered why she didn't bother to pick up house slippers last time she went out shopping. She kept Valon's gaze through it all, his eyes never straying from hers, and hers not even trying. She pressed her lips together tight.

"How does ramen sound?"

Valon almost jumped. "What?"

"For dinner." She grabbed a wooden spoon from the open drawer on her left and twirled it between her fingers, then jabbed a thumb back toward the large pot sitting innocently on the stove. "Ramen."

"Oh. Right, that's fine," he muttered, and if she hadn't known better, she would have thought for a moment his cheeks turned pink.

She looked at him, contemplating whether to roll her eyes or smile at the nervousness plaguing his face, and tapped her nails on the counter as she flicked her eyes to the floor.

"No, I haven't seen them," she answered in a voice quite simple and plain, as if she had told him that they were out of milk at the usual grocery store and she would have to try another. He looked up sharp and quick, but she only gave him a neutral gaze before turning to the counter and picking up the packets of noodles she had dug out of the cabinets. "Not in person, anyway. I think Jounouchi and Yuugi were in a tournament a while back."

Valon breathed out slow. "Huh."

"What?"

"Nothing," he almost sputtered as she turned to meet his eyes. She raised her eyebrows, tore open the packets, and dumped them into the water without another word.

When she glanced back to him, Valon was rubbing his arm.

He swallowed loud enough to hear and shrugged, more to himself than to her. "I guess they're … not really so bad, are they?"

She lowered her brow. "Who?"

"Those guys," he added, and this time he got so close to sputtering she might have laughed at him if she hadn't wanted to know what he was going to say. She wondered if Raphael or Amelda had ever seen him this nervous, when he so often kept his cool unless he was angry. He glanced away. "That Yuugi kid and … well, Jounouchi, too. They're not jerks, anyway."

Mai stopped in the stirring motions she had begun through the pot just to her side. She looked to the floor, and to the bubbling noodles in the pot, and at her own free hand hanging at her side. She felt the sting deep within her own chest, and she wondered if she could scream out her heart and it would never go away.

"No. No, they're not."

Their voices fell to silence, leaving nothing but the popping of bubbles in the water on the stove.

Valon cleared his throat.

"So." His voice reflected that of one trying to pretend the conversation had never swayed in the direction of the uncertain. He stuck his hands in his pockets in that old familiar gesture and nodded his head toward the stove. "Ramen."

Mai tapped her wooden spoon on the edge of the pot and stirred the bubbling noodles again. She nodded. "Yeah. What do you want on it?"

"Cheese."

"_Cheese?_"

"Yeah. I like cheese," Valon added, not even flinching when Mai dropped her jaw in her own version of an undignified gape. His face remained perfectly stoic as he stared back. "Cheddar."

She lowered her brow, half in smug satisfaction and half in threat. "We don't have cheddar."

He crossed his arms over his chest and quirked one eyebrow up in an expression that couldn't have been naively innocent if it had tried. "I thought it was your turn to shop?"

Mai slammed the spoon on the edge of the pot almost enough to knock it from the stove.

"If you want cheddar, go buy it yourself!"

Valon opened his mouth in one of his usual smirking retorts, but was cut off by a face peeking in through the kitchen door. A face with dark red hair and eyes that had once seemed so harsh but now seemed almost young and gentle, and surprisingly mature.

And, an instant after they appeared, hungry.

Amelda stepped in in full and let a wide smile light up his face. "Hey, ramen!" He paused, blinked, and let his brow furrow and his smile fade. "Wait … I thought it was my turn …

As if on some unknown cue, a head of blonde hair poked in through the doorway and blinked with that ever-stoic, serious look at the three that stood before him. Raphael crossed his arms over his chest, something that had always struck Mai as a particularly amusing position for someone with muscles that made up half his body weight.

"Actually, it's Valon's turn."

Valon quite nearly fell off his feet as he spun around to face him. "Eh?"

"Look at the calendar," Raphael added with a finger pointing to the little motorcycle-themed calendar they kept just to the left of the sink, names scribbled under each of the dates. His lips almost, but not quite, twitched into a smug little smirk. "Your turn."

Valon scrambled through the kitchen, Mai stepping neatly out of his way, to stare into the red pen scrawled in very distinctive messy handwriting under the particular Tuesday in question. His eyes went the size of saucers. Mai grinned a grin she did not try to hide and shrugged as clearly as she could.

"Great!"

She tossed her wooden spoon with a flick of her hand just to her right. The bottom end poked into Valon's brown spikes and went clattering down to the kitchen floor. Mai put her hands on her hips, swinging them like she had seen models do on TV as a child, and smirked if only to herself as she slipped past a snickering Amelda and Raphael through the kitchen doorway.

"Get cooking, hair boy, I'm starved!" she called back. She didn't bother to conceal the sadistic joy in her tone. "And I want cheddar on my ramen!"

Footsteps clacked as Valon ran to nearly throw himself out of the kitchen. "But we don't have cheddar, Mai, you just _said_ that!"

Mai flopped herself down on the decades-old tan couch in their makeshift living room and propped her bare feet up on the little table.

"Then you'd better hurry before they close the grocery store!"

She didn't turn back to see him, but she could hear him doing his best impression of a growl as he stomped away, and heard the boots he never bothered to take off even in the "house" hit the floor as he trudged back into the kitchen, Raphael concealing his laughter and Amelda not even giving an effort to try.

Mai merely gave a full and hearty laugh as she dug around in the cushions for the TV remote, and reminded herself to tell him at the last minute that she wanted eggs instead.

* * *

><p>It had been a month after meeting up when Raphael and Amelda said it was time they left.<p>

It wasn't the sort of thing that inspired anger or even regret. It was just the sort of gentle knowledge, the acceptance of what had to be, that Mai was beginning to grow used to in her own quiet life. They had told her and Valon very plainly, and they hadn't argued or protested. They all had their times to set out on their own journeys, and those two just happened to be the first.

They couldn't stay in their little piece of timeless past forever.

And so they had left. Mai and Valon had waved goodbye to them as they set out to find their own lives and their own paths. They left no phone numbers or contacts. Just their names, and even those gave them very little with which to find one another again.

But they would find one another nonetheless. They had done it once, and the thought had never crossed Mai's mind that they couldn't do it again.

Of course, Mai had insisted Valon could no longer spend time with her when they went shopping or out in the city, or else people would start thinking things. She had been joking, but Valon still threw up hands in defense, as he always did, and as always, she laughed. And within a few days, they had settled back into their own version of a lifestyle. Their own little piece of the world where nothing else mattered but them.

That was what she told herself, every time, but somehow, she could never really believe it.

Every time, it felt like she had her finger on the hand of the clock, forcing back its ticking, keeping it from moving forward, and every moment, it seemed the hand pushed more against her will.

And it had seemed like so much longer than a week since the departure of two of her friends when she found herself sitting on the roof of their warehouse in the early hours of the evening, staring out into the distance, only to have the peace of her own ignorance shattered by the clanking of boots on metal and a voice tearing into the perfect light.

"You miss him."

Mai didn't jolt this time. She supposed she had gotten too used to having him sneak up on her to be surprised anymore, and even if he _had_ been trying to sneak around this time, doing so on a metal roof would have been considerably difficult. She turned her head, slow and almost stoic, to see him standing a few meters away.

She gave him her best sarcastic look, but surprise still worked its way onto her face. "What?"

Valon stuffed his hands in his pockets and quirked his head just enough to make that matter-of-fact, not quite stoic expression look like an accusation. His face left little room for question. "You miss him. Don't you? That guy with the mop hair."

Mai lowered her brow.

"He's got a name and you know it."

Valon half-rolled his eyes, but Mai had known him for far too long to take such a gesture to mean anything. He stepped over the waving pattern of the roof, his boots clanking on the metal so loud she almost asked him if he had any headache medication on him before she got a migraine. Each step slow, calculating. He looked down at her with that same expression. Not smiling, no sympathy in those eyes that had seemed so immature just earlier that day.

He let his arms hang at his sides with his hands still in his pockets. Those eyes that did not smile burned into her core.

"Admit it, Mai. You miss him. We both know it."

Mai sighed very loud and very heavy, but not frustrated, as she had intended. She rested her elbows on her knees and her cheeks in her palms, each nail tapping the skin under her eyes as if it would somehow knock her out of this phase.

"I miss all of them."

She didn't look at him again, but she could tell he was quirking his head, and she almost flinched when his boots clanked another step forward on the roof. "You really liked 'em, didn't you?"

Mai said nothing. She sighed again, this time not even trying to act frustrated. Her cheeks settled into the palms of her hands and her nails stilled, and she stared out into the distance where the shoreline mocked her. It was nearly sunset, and the blue of the sky had faded to oranges and pinks and reds and yellows, and somehow she could imagine a boy with hair that matched the yellow sun laughing somewhere far away. She wondered if he was looking at the sunset, too.

"I saw you with them," Valon went on, gentler now. Another boot clanking on the roof, so he almost stood next to her, staring out at the horizon. "How you looked at them."

She shook her head, and her lips quirked into a bitter laugh and smirk. "I hated them, then."

"No you didn't," Valon shot back. It wasn't accusatory, it wasn't angry. But it didn't hesitate and it didn't question, like she had told him she had red hair and he was trying to remind her she had blonde. "Not really. You loved 'em."

"What?"

She turned his head in full this time and looked straight into his face. Even she couldn't tell if she stared at him with anger or wonder or something she wouldn't be able to read if she had tried. Something in her chest twisted and ached like he had taken a needle and jabbed it in an old wound she had long forgotten, and the pain was both a shock and unbelievably familiar all at once.

Valon didn't flinch. "You loved them. All of them."

Mai opened her mouth, and closed it again, and every time she thought words came to her lips, they disappeared as soon as she tried to make herself speak.

He looked at her, long, and almost gentle. He sighed, and though it was quiet, she didn't think a sigh could sound both so simple and so sad.

"I always thought we were the same," he muttered, but louder than a mutter, with his head hanging down and his shoulders lifting up in a half-hearted shrug. He looked at her, and looked out at the horizon. He rubbed his arm with a free hand. "That … we'd been through the same kind'a things, we were alike. And maybe …"

His words caught somewhere deep within him, and he turned his head to look her in the eyes.

"But that wasn't you." He sighed again, shook his head, met her gaze in full. "Maybe it was a long time ago, but it wasn't you, even before we met. You found them, and _they _were who you were supposed to be."

She wanted to grab her knees and pull them close to her chest, or run across the roof and leap out into the open sky, and hope that she could grow wings and fly away. But she could not fly away, and she could not force her legs to move. She furrowed her brow and turned her eyes aside.

"You're surprisingly deep today."

He laughed something that wasn't a laugh, quiet, uncertain, and she imagined that he shrugged again. "Heh, it's just a mood. It'll pass."

Mai thought hard, but she could think of nothing else to say.

A second later, he took a step back on the roof, and somehow his boots didn't clank as loudly this time with each move he made. She couldn't tell if he was smiling at her, or if that twitch of his lips came from the ironic sadness and quiet knowing in his voice.

"It's your choice, Mai. It's your life."

Mai scoffed, and it stung deep in her chest when the sound left her mouth. "I know that."

Valon smiled, a real smile this time, and the way his eyebrows quirked and twisted it almost made her want to scream out to the world everything she couldn't think and couldn't say. But she stayed silent, and Valon still smiled at her, and in that one instant, she could no longer imagine him riding on that motorcycle carrying out his missions for Dartz, or locked away as a delinquent. She just saw a young man who knew so much and yet so little, and had so much left to say.

His smile made the sting in her chest dig in deep.

"Then you already know I can't tell you what to do."

Silence. Grasshoppers buzzed, crickets chirped, the ocean swayed, and somewhere far away, a boy with moppy blonde hair laughed.

Mai lowered her brow. "Your advice would suck anyway," she shot back.

But her lips turned into a smile without her even realizing it until it was already there.

It seemed an eternity and a day that Valon stood there on the roof, looking back at her. His smile never once faded. It never twitched into a frown or a sarcastic comment, or even tried make all of this somehow seem less sharp. It always remained a smile, even when his eyes gleamed with an ache he would never express, and words of things he could never feel.

Then he walked away, boots clanking on the roof, and Mai was left alone to stare into the setting sun.

* * *

><p><em>She could see the buildings out in the distance.<em>

_ Of course, she was still a good deal too far away to know which buildings they were, or to be sure that she wasn't seeing what she wanted to see in a bunch of random buildings that just happened to look like the ones she remembered. But the sparkle of a city had turned into the sparkle of little towns all around it. Not that it was a big city she was looking for in the first place. It stood out, though, with tall buildings and a dome near the edge that drew eyes to itself like the Coliseum._

_ And this little place stood out._

_ So it was there that she was going to go._

_ She imagined words whispered in her head. Or spoken, or even screamed, but in her head they were only whispers. She imagined one smiling face and another, on each side of her, each reaching out a hand to help. One to pull her in, and one to push her away._

_ Mai looked at one, and she looked at the other, and she wondered for just a second whether she should take the owner of hand that pushed her away and drag him along with her. She wondered it, and reached out, before she pulled back and turned away._

_ She pressed further down on the pedal for the motor and went zooming off toward the growing sparkle on the horizon._

* * *

><p>"I don't suppose changing your mind is an option at this point, is it?"<p>

If she hadn't already grown so used to his sneaking up on her that she now expected it, she might have slipped on the foot she had taken to leaning on and gone crashing to the ground, along with her motorcycle on top of her and the duffel bag she had tied around her waist. But as it was, she had grown used to his odd tactics of striking up a conversation a long time before, and as it was, she just turned her head enough to meet his eyes.

From a distance, she couldn't tell whether that smile he wore was genuine. She wore no smile at all, and merely pursed her lips and tried to make herself look away.

He scoffed, and it sounded so close to a chuckle it was difficult to tell the difference. He flicked his head toward the ceiling of the old warehouse, the place both of them had come so close to calling home. "I almost wanna try to convince you to stay."

Mai bit the inside of her lip and swallowed the bitter taste in her throat.

"Valon …"

"But I can't do that."

Her head shot up at the sudden addition, and this time she couldn't keep herself from seeing all the emotions that swirled so obviously on his face. The flickers of sadness, of regret, that continued to rush back and forth amidst an expression that could not have held more determination if it wanted to. A face that had resigned itself to fact, and a face that was trying so very hard to believe that this was the right thing to do. He sighed.

"I couldn't live with myself if I knew I held you back when you need to go."

She sighed, too, but her sigh was different, and even she couldn't quite figure out why.

He scoffed again, and this scoff sounded very much like a laugh. She met his eyes and found him smirking that old smirk he had worn in their more laid-back moments.

"Hey, why so sad-faced?" he piped in, and for a second, she almost thought he sounded new again. She almost thought he still sounded like the kid inside, the messed-up delinquent who simply didn't know where else he was supposed to go but here, the kid who was only beginning to realize that home wasn't as far away as he had once believed. "You know I hate it when you look like that."

Mai furrowed her brow and puffed her bottom lip in a half-vain attempt to look indignant. "Are you insulting a lady's looks?"

Valon threw up his hands.

"H-hey, all I said was—"

"Relax, crazy boy," she finished with a voice quiet and resigned, though different from the way he had been. The tiny smile that had quirked its way onto her face faded, and she let out another long breath that wasn't quite heavy enough to be sad. "Thank you."

Valon let go of the faint tension in his shoulders and cocked his head to the side in a look that almost gave him an air of innocence. "For what?"

She breathed out again.

"Exactly."

It would have been so easy to get up from her bike and throw her duffel bag to the ground and run across the warehouse floor. It would have been so easy to throw herself forward and hug him one more time like she had never truly done before. It would have been all too easy to tell him that he still meant a piece of the world to her, even when they both knew all too clearly that he was only a piece, and there were others who would always mean just as much, no matter what he did.

It would have been so easy, but Mai balanced herself on the bike, flipped down her helmet, turned the key, and pressed her foot to the gas to go racing out the open door of the warehouse and out into the blinding day.

She did not look back, but she could still imagine his smile and his confident but stumbling steps as he ran out that door and waved to her more the further away she got, and she could just hear the quiet shouting in the distance of the boyish, young, wise voice calling out, "Let's do this again sometime, right!"

And even though she knew all too well that he would not see, she smiled, one last true smile and nodded one more time as the sun flashed against her helmet and the cool air bit her bare arms in the wind.

_Yeah._

* * *

><p>It looked exactly as she remembered.<p>

Not as if she had expected it to change. It hadn't been all that long, if she really thought about it. The weather had cooled and the leaves had fallen from the trees, and the wind still burned her skin with cold where she had forgotten to wear a good thick jacket. But it was the same as when she had seen it last, with the bare trees along parts of the road and busy sidewalks and tall buildings and little game shops, the same by which she had fought her duels for Battle City, and the same by which she had reunited with those she could never seem to forget.

Domino City.

She slowed her speed to some reasonable limit at the first glimpse of a police car out of the corner of her eye. She doubted any of them were really on the lookout for a blonde woman zooming around on a motorcycle, but still, the last thing she needed was to get here and have the first thing she do be getting a ticket.

She almost laughed when she heard Valon's voice in her head muttering, "That'd be a pretty sucky birthday present."

Mai pulled a little on the brakes at a stoplight behind a truck and a little car, one of the newer ones. She was glad she hadn't told him before she left that it was her birthday. She had remembered, of course, especially since Raphael insisted on keeping a calendar in the most obvious spot in the kitchen. But she had never written it down or mentioned it to anyone. Least of all Valon. He probably would have given her some huge present that very morning, and wouldn't have let her leave unless she carried it along with her, and she would have been stuck driving hours on end with some huge gift strapped to the back of her bike.

He had already given her such confusing directions, even if she had finally managed to arrive. She wouldn't put two silly mistakes past him for today.

She looked around for a clock as she navigated the streets, pulling over occasionally to ask for directions since it had been so long since her last visit. She had never had a use to find somewhere that wasn't a coffee shop or café or a nice little store to pick up some new clothes to replace her worn-down outfits. People stared at her, gawking at the woman who matched this city about as well as polka-dot orange matched black. But they gave her directions, and again, she started on her way.

Somehow, the time it took her to pull up in front of the entrance to that little school seemed infinitely longer than all the hours it had taken just to find the town.

And somehow, she still didn't mind.

She stopped her bike and kicked down the stand. The motor still hummed its usual hum when she refused to shut it off, stopping right in front of the little arch that made up the entrance to Domino High. She leaned on her foot and propped it up and leaned on it again. She waited. She listened.

And after a few minutes of nothing but the buzzing of her bike and the cold wind breezing against her skin, the bell inside sounded, and front doors burst.

Mai flicked her eyes back and forth among every student that walked out. She wondered if she had looked anything like that back in high school, back when she would have laughed if someone told her she was going to end up a casino dealer on a ship or dueling for prizes and money or dueling to steal souls and hang out with graduates of juvenile detention. She looked at the girls in their pink blouses, laughing and smiling and staring at her with wondrous eyes, and boys that scurried past her like she was a celebrity they dared not approach.

She moved a hand to pull off her helmet and tuck it under her arm, and as she looked back up, she caught a flash of tri-colored spikes and a mop of blonde locks making their way out into the yard.

She looked at them. She looked at them without saying a word. She looked, and after some infinite silence, the tiny, big-eyed face framed by the tri-colored hair looked back and dropped his jaw just a bit.

"Hey, is that …?"

The words separated themselves from the pack of little conversations surrounding her. Drawing themselves away like she had plucked them from the ocean's depths.

Another boy, the tallest one with the spike of hair coated in gel, nearly tripped over his own feet. A cheery, pink-tinted visage with growing brown locks turned her head up and gasped almost loud enough to hear.

"Mai?"

"Mai-san?"

And pushing his way to the front of the group, not the tallest, not the shortest, with hair that almost matched hers—hair she was going to have to make sure he got cut—and big brown eyes that had never shown quite like they did in that one instant that they connected with hers, the last of them let his lips turned into a smile she knew someday she would learn to understand.

"Mai!"

She reached a hand and shut off the buzzing motor, letting the humming fade to silence and the sound of racing footsteps fill her ears. And as the sound of footsteps was overrun by calls of joy and recognition and laughter, she felt the warmth of the sun shining on her face, and the faint glimmer of a new day glowing in her eyes.

Glowing in the chuckle of that spiky-haired young man far away, and glowing in the smile of that silly boy who waved high into the air to meet her once again.

_Happy__ birthday, __Mai._

And she smiled, too.


End file.
